Those notices haven’t disappeared completely,
of course. But there’s been far fewer of them in recent weeks.

A major reason seems to be that the Party
leadership seems to be signaling that the anticorruption crusade has been
scaring too many of the wrong officials—for example, those who were eager to
see the crackdown on graft succeed so
that they could start paying attention to local problems. These clean
cadres bought into Chairman Xi Jinping’s political platform long ago, and they’ve
been eager to implement reforms at the local level, only to be stymied as
Beijing’s focus has been on cleaning up corruption.

One of those reforms is very much a
transformation, and because it’s so sensitive, cadres are reluctant to refer to
it directly—even in private.The effort
is this: dissolving the ties between officials and developers—a connection that
was the fulcrum of local economic expansion and political advancement.

Each side benefitted from that arrangement. Party
members and government officials saw economic growth (particularly in the
housing market), which got them promoted under Xi’s predecessors. Developers
received special access and resources granted by those who made such decisions,
so that they could continue honing their craft. For a local official, being
good at your job meant getting more jobs. That almost always involved releasing
land for sale to property companies, who would then lease it out for housing,
manufacturing, or hawking it to other firms (which were often just extensions
of government offices).

The temptations were obvious, and evolved
into a self-reinforcing ring of graft, which spiraled into deeper and more
expansive levels of vice. So, if you were good at being bad, you’d get
promoted—and the scale of your thievery grew; that is, you became a “tiger”. If
you were just hovering around the edges, you were a “fly”.

It’s been this connection between the private
sector and public servants--a couple of decades in the making--that’s responsible
for the vast majority of the local government corruption in China.

And Xi and his allies knew it.

For a while, the only way it seemed to get at
the rot below was to decapitate those who were now at or near the top.So there were campaigns to snare “tigers”,
and recent threats to go after “flies”—even an effort to grab both, because
some in the Xi leadership clearly recognize that there’s a connection (for
example in Henan, which has started to resemble a warlord province,
impervious to Beijing’s supervision).

Still, the anticorruption crusade was scary,
and it was diverting:Local cadres began
to believe that cleanliness was important than competence. They hunkered down, instead of saddling up.

And in Jiangsu earlier this week, the head of
the province—Party Secretary Luo Zhijun—proposed
that the goal should be “to further improve the mechanism by which faults would
be accepted and correct; to actively create conditions conducive to
exploration; to have an atmosphere of work that would tolerate mistakes.”Luo and his colleagues put the problem as
officials having “an insufficient mental appetite” [干部精神状态不振]—that there is a tendency on the
part of some officials to say something can’t be done, or shouldn’t be done, or
isn’t the problem, and then not act at all.

In other words, cadres are not to be
chastised for addressing local problems, even if those initiatives should fail.But they must do something.

As ever, the question is, what's responsible for these moves?It’s possible that party reformers in Beijing
are using the various obstacles with the anticorruption campaign that Xi and
his allies have run into as an opportunity to push forward ideas, especially to get cadres
to pay more attention to their real bosses than local tycoons. These reformers don't like the status quo of a cozy relationship and are signalling lower echelons that they expect action to do more than just transfer property.

It’s also conceivable that the cleaner of the
cadres are pushing for political cover so that they can experiment with new
arrangements and new policies that are unsustainable without that support. Local officials might be seeing signs of unhappiness at the grassroots level.

Maybe it’s a bit of both.

Whatever the case, it’s yet another instance
of at least an attempt at reform. For that reason--and others--it's worth paying close attention to see where it goes, and how it all ends up.